![As Plentiful and Messy as a Box of Mementos.
A Contrary review by Harriett Green

Two springs ago, I attended a poetry reading at the Art Institute of Chicago that featured Donald Hall, then the American poet laureate, and the British poet laureate, Andrew Motion. Hall’s frail body, hunched over a chair, contrasted starkly to the unflinching and raw sensuality of his words. His reading evoked a power that is lacking in his new memoir Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry.
The newest of Donald Hall’s several acclaimed memoirs, Unpacking the Boxes is a thin and rather disjointed recounting of a life interwoven with poetry. He writes of rummaging through boxes of mementos in the aftermath of family deaths, and the meandering nature of this book suggests it was organized in similar fashion, with Hall selecting life experiences from his boxes of memory and squinting at them in a literary light.
He opens with his childhood in suburban Connecticut, asserting that his parents supported his aspirations to be a poet from the beginning—“They worried how I would make a living at poetry, but would not pressure me to join the prosperous family business”—and he continues with his sometime adventurous days immersed in the world of poetry at Philips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford, and as an adult writer and teacher. As Hall recounts his experiences as a writer, Unpacking the Boxes unfolds as a Who’s Who of the Twentieth-Century literary world, with one name casually dropped after another, including George Plimpton, John Ashbury, his close friends Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich, and Harvard classmates Frank O’Hara and Edward Gorey. Yet the most memorable parts of the book are the quieter, everyday moments. He beautifully reflects on his early years as an only child, remembering, “As early as possible I determined to be a pitcher—as later I determined to be John Keats and T.S. Eliot. My father bought a catcher's mitt and squatted on the Greenway Street sidewalk: 'Put 'er there.' I put her there, sometimes, but frequently hurled wild pitches that flew ten feet over his head and rolled down the suburban gutter.”
Hall's incisive eye also unearths the tragedy that shadowed his parents' prosperous suburban life: "I saw my father weeping (a father who weeps is a gift to his son, but it disturbed me then) over his misery working for a father who never wept. . . . From an early age I was told that [my father] shook his fist over my cradle, saying, 'He's going to do what he wants to do.' I grew up to reject my father's culture by following my father's advice, choosing a place and a work that were alien to him."
He recounts his adventures at school and abroad with dry humor. He remembers of Oxford: "Eventually I learned the language, and discovered that rudeness was a mating call. If you responded to rudeness with rudeness, you might begin a friendship. . . . To talk with enthusiasm was to be a dork; to display intelligence was ostentatious and violated the social code. After six weeks, I had acquired a tone of frivolity."
The heart of the book, however, is a rambling chronicle of his development as a poet and writer: He airily recounts his prestigious awards and experiences, such as editing soon-to-be famous writers in the Harvard Advocate, writing for the New Yorker, and being chosen as the United States poet laureate; he looks sardonically at the unglamorous practicalities of making a living as a writer, including calling in favors to secure paid assignments and wrestling with the political tangles of university teaching; and threaded through all of his reflections are his ruminations on the craft of poetry. From “the thin air of antiquity’s planet,” Hall weaves a slightly disorganized but ultimately fascinating account of his core inspirations, his cultivation of rhythm and style, his battles with Beat poets and his admiration for classicists.
Hall quotes an essay he wrote soon after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, in which he observes: “The beauty of art is only a first (albeit ineluctable) requirement. Poems may comfort the afflicted—by the beauty of sound, by humor, by intelligence or wisdom, by the pleasures of resolution, by exact rendering of emotion, and by the embrace of human feeling.” Unpacking the Boxes is an uneven yet ultimately thoughtful telling of how the poet creates these totems of beauty and comfort, one word at a time.
Harriett Green is pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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© 2008 | all rights reserved
about us | xml feed | Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine | donate $1 | contact us